From the Inside Flap
Living Your Personal Brand The Key to Enduring Individual and Business Success Brand building is typically identified with businesses, but personal and professional relationships can also be seen and managed by these practical and proven techniques. It s not enough to simply paste on a superficial veneer. Brands, like special relationships, are real and make a difference. Just as the greatest business brands succeed through authenticity, your personal brand must reflect a sense of purpose, vision and values that truly embodies the real you.
David McNally and Karl Speak will show you how to create just such a personal brand. Using powerful techniques refined in the heat of business competition, they ll guide you in defining and building a personal brand that is strong because it is distinctive, relevant, and consistent. A strong personal brand will enrich you personally as well as professionally. This book provides:
An in-depth understanding of the principles of successful brand building in any context
Practical tools to build and manage powerful relationships in all aspects of your life
Strategies for aligning your personal brand values with your employer s brand values and making brand building a successful endeavor for you and the organization
Advanced personal brand management techniques to help you stay on course as you continually refine and improve your unique personal brand.
Personal brand management will help you become more successful by building special relationships that allow you to get credit for who you really are and what you believe in. By daring to be your own brand you get to be more of who you are, not less the most authentic strategy for success throughout your life.
Be Your Own Brand gets right to the heart of how people can become a powerful, creative force in their own lives.
Bill Rutherford, Chief Financial Officer, Eastern Group, Hospital Corporation of America
Be Your Own Brand David McNally and Karl Speak start from the premise that a brand is a relationship, not a statement. And a personal brand is a special type of relationship, fueled by a strong belief system and tied to an emotional connection. Companies and products with strong brands are always the most successful in their industries. Strong, enduring personal relationships are every bit as sound and satisfying. Using the proven principles of successful brand building, McNally and Speak will show you how to build the kind of enduring, resilient relationships that can drive personal as well as professional success.
In an accessible style, Be Your Own Brand presents a new and compelling brand-development model personal brand management to help you succeed by building on your own unique values and beliefs. These branded relationships will let you be more of who you are, not less, in all facets of your life. And Be Your Own Brand will help you create relationships that, like the best brands in the world of business, truly stand the test of time. This innovative brand development approach will also benefit companies and organizations of all types by harnessing the power of the individual to ignite the collective brand building power inside the organization.
David McNally is a best selling author, an internationally acclaimed speaker, and an award-winning film producer. He is the author of the bestselling Even Eagles Need a Push: Learning to Soar in a Changing World and The Eagle s Secret: Success Strategies for Thriving at Work and in Life. He has spoken before such organizations as Merrill Lynch, The Washington Post, Unisys, Dun & Bradstreet, Honeywell, American Express Financial, State Farm Insurance, and Amway.
Karl D. Speak is president of Beyond Marketing Thought, a global brand management consulting firm. In addition to his many consulting assignments, his Executive Branding Workshops , seminars, and keynotes help take the mystique out of brand management issues for audiences representing every size, scale, and type of business. He writes regularly for magazines ranging from Design Management Journal to the Journal of Health Care Marketing. He has taught in MBA programs from the University of Minnesota to London s renowned University of Westminster. His client list includes industry leaders like Target Corporation, Wall Street Journal, Stanley Tool Works, Skandia, Pillsbury, FedEx, US Bancorp Piper Jaffray, Sony, American Express, Cargill, Sara Lee, 3M, Honeywell.
About the Author
David McNally is a best selling author, an internationally acclaimed speaker, and an award-winning film producer. He is the author of the bestselling Even Eagles Need a Push: Learning to Soar in a Changing World and The Eagle’s Secret: Success Strategies for Thriving at Work and in Life. He has spoken before such organizations as Merrill Lynch, The Washington Post, Unisys, Dun & Bradstreet, Honeywell, American Express Financial, State Farm Insurance, and Amway.
Karl D. Speak is president of Beyond Marketing Thought, a global brand management consulting firm. In addition to his many consulting assignments, his Executive Branding Workshops™, seminars, and keynotes help take the mystique out of brand management issues for audiences representing every size, scale, and type of business. He writes regularly for magazines ranging from Design Management Journal to the Journal of Health Care Marketing. He has taught in MBA programs from the University of Minnesota to London’s renowned University of Westminster. His client list includes industry leaders like Target Corporation, Wall Street Journal, Stanley Tool Works, Skandia, Pillsbury, FedEx, US Bancorp Piper Jaffray, Sony, American Express, Cargill, Sara Lee, 3M, Honeywell.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
INTRODUCTION
Being More of Who You Are
Everyone has a brand, and anyone can be a strong brand. It doesn’t involve changing your personality—you can be an introvert or extrovert. And it’s definitely not about trying to be something you’re not. The difference between one personal brand and another is that the person with a strong brand utilizes his or her special qualities to make a difference in the lives of others. Read that last sentence again, because it is the foundation upon which a strong personal brand is built. Using one’s values and distinctive qualities to make a difference for others is the core ethos of strong, thriving personal brands.
Using marketing techniques merely to create a high profile for oneself is not the point and won’t make you a stronger brand. When you make a discernable difference in the life of another, you make a lasting impression and your brand receives credit—a deposit in the “trust bank.” Every meaningful impression adds more “credits” that build toward the establishment of a trusting relationship. Since the ability to build trusting relationships is a key component of professional and personal success, people with strong personal brands are able to achieve more of what they want by being more of who they are.
One cannot underestimate the importance of authenticity, nor can one overestimate the power of alignment in striving to become a stronger brand. The challenge to building a stronger brand is to have the courage to operate authentically, to strive to find alignment with others, and to be creative in applying one’s special qualities to make a difference as often as possible. Passing along these and other “lessons learned” is our motivation for revising Be Your Own Brand.
In the first edition of Be Your Own Brand we successfully provided the first book that lays out a pragmatic framework for an individual to implement the principles of personal brand. Since writing the first edition, we observed two important trends that have made a big impact on personal brand: The first was the rapid growth and acceptance of personal brand as a professional development framework. The many books written about personal brand that followed Be Your Own Brand—some in substance and others in title only—have helped expand its use. The second trend is social media. The introduction and omnipresence of social media has created a tool that enables individuals to build a stronger personal brand in a way hardly imagined when we published the first edition.
After the book was published in 2002, we set out on our separate paths to apply the concepts of personal brand in our different businesses.
Karl, as the principal of Brand Tool Box, Ltd., applied the concepts of personal brand in his capacity as a corporate brand strategist. The pragmatic framework of personal brand allowed Karl to create a useful and powerful foundation for internal brand building. At the core of this corporate brand-building innovation is a framework to align the personal brands of employees with the brand of their corporate employer.
David, as a renowned business speaker and executive coach, employed the framework of personal brand in his business, which is built on inspiring others to thrive through living a purposeful life. David’s work in encouraging and coaching individuals to create powerful alignment of their personal brand with the contribution expected of them by their employers resulted in significantly higher employee engagement and commitment to key corporate strategies.
After traveling in our separate circles for years, we got together and compared notes. We observed that people with strong personal brands had a rich network of resources—functional and emotional—that powered the achievement of their goals. Our belief was reinforced that the “formula” for creating a strong personal brand is not complex, however, and that it is clearly a myth that personal brand building involves or requires shameless self-promotion.
Since writing the original edition of Be Your Own Brand, we have watched with interest the evolution of the concept of personal brand. In some ways its evolution has mimicked the advancement of the concept of business brand. Slowly (far too slowly in our opinion), companies are realizing that consumers trust a brand (the relationship they have with a product or company) because it consistently provides value and makes a difference for them. Another way of saying that is, Trust exists because the company or brand delivers on its promises.
We are even clearer today that this construct also holds true for personal brand. Our practice of adding value and consistently making a difference in the lives of others as the pathway to a strong personal brand is what separates our approach. This stance is the basis for this revision of Be Your Own Brand.
In this revised and expanded edition, Be Your Own Brand provides you with a contemporary perspective, including the effect of social media on personal brand and a set of tools to help you build a stronger one. We have structured the book in a modular fashion, enabling you to navigate the content in a way that best fits your style. First of all there are three logical sections: “Personal Brand Basics”; “Designing Your Personal Brand of Making a Difference”; and “Using the Power of Alignment to Build a Stronger Personal Brand.” Within each of these sections is a set of stand-alone chapters all designed to be a quick read focused on a key element of personal brand building.
Along the way, we will introduce you to a number of interesting individuals who demonstrate how people who dedicate the distinctive qualities of their strong personal brand to making a difference for others build a successful life. You will meet Chip Bell, a great guy who brings a smile to the face of even the grumpiest person. You will also meet Terry Fox, a Canadian hero, who will inspire you with his dedication to making a difference. An introduction to Dr. David Dunn, a prominent world-class surgeon and medical researcher, will demonstrate how a strong personal brand is making a fundamental difference in the global health-care system.
We will introduce you to Temple Grandin—a woman with severe autism since she was a child, who has invented some of the most important improvements in the humane treatment of cattle and was the recent subject of a highly acclaimed HBO film. And you will meet Norman Borlaug, who single-handedly started the Green Revolution and did more than anyone else in the twentieth century to teach the world to feed itself, reducing world hunger on a large scale. And then there’s Willem Kolff, a humble Dutch physician who was the pioneer inventor of two important medical devices that have saved millions of lives.
After eight years of helping others understand and embrace the concepts of personal brand, we think we have learned a few things and firmly believe that by sharing them with others the world will benefit from having more strong personal brands. We are hopeful that this is one way we can make a difference, by being more of who we are.
